Time to meet the Gibraltarthals

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Archaeologists search for more finds in Gorham’s Cave, which has been earmarked for World Heritage status

Mark Barber

Published at 12:00AM, July 13 2013

The Rock was home to ancient relatives, reports Mark Barber

In 1848, Captain Edmund Flint of the Royal Navy found an unusual looking skull
in a limestone cave in Forbes Quarry at the northern base of the Rock. No
one knew what it was and the skull was placed in the Garrison library and
largely forgotten.

Then in 1856 a similar skull was discovered in the Neander Valley in Germany
and was described as a separate species the following year. That, together
with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859,
led to the Gibraltar skull being re-examined and identified.

But although Flint’s discovery had been eight years earlier, the species had
become known as Neanderthal, after the site of the second find.

The Rock again grabbed the attention of anthropologists in 1926, when Dorothy
Garrod, the pioneering prehistorian who became the first woman to be elected
a professor at Cambridge, discovered a Neanderthal child on a dig near
Forbes Quarry.

Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum and professor of
anthropology at the University of Toronto, says: “Using modern computer
techniques, the whole skull and even the inner ear have been reconstructed
and we know that it was a child that died 60,000 years ago at the age of
four .”

Finlayson also heads the archaeological research project in Gibraltar. Now in
its 22nd year, the project covers nine caves that make up the highest
concentration of Neanderthal activity in the world. So important is the site
that four of the caves — Gorham’s, Vanguard, Bennett’s and Hyena — have been
placed on Unesco’s tentative list for World Heritage status. Located just
above sea level on the west coast of the Rock and having remained largely
untouched for millennia, they are providing unrivalled evidence of what life
was like for Gibraltarian Neanderthals.

From fossils, stone tools and petrified charcoals the archaeologists have
identified not only the animals the Neanderthals were eating but also the
plants that were growing. Radio carbon dating of a recently discovered
hearth revealed that Neanderthals were living on Gibraltar as recently as
28,000 years ago — the last known survivors of their species by a few
thousand years.

“It is a bit of an irony that having found some of the first fossil evidence
of Neanderthals, we have also found the last ones to be alive,” Finlayson
says.

It appears that they were living in a climatic refuge while Northern Europe
was in the grip of the Ice Age. The caves now look over the Atlantic, but at
the time of the last Neanderthals a great plain containing antelope, hyenas
and leopards was spread out before them.

Finlayson and his team have uncovered a wealth of details such as dried up
ponds containing fossilised frogs, birds and pollen dating back 50,000
years. They are now beginning to piece together a complete ecosystem around
the Neanderthals.

The project is also beginning to reveal something of the sophistication and
culture of these people. From an extensive study of the evidence gathered,
Finlayson published a paper last year in which he argued that Gibraltarian
Neanderthals were catching birds of prey, apparently to wear their feathers.

The World Heritage nomination is due to be reviewed in January 2015. If all
goes well, the caves will be granted World Heritage status by July 2016.

“We have had the luck that these caves have been preserved. But what excites
us is that we started off with the Forbes Quarry in the 19th century and we
now have nine caves that we know Neanderthals were living in, two of them
containing fossils,” Finlayson says.

Who knows what these three-and-a-half square miles of rock will reveal next
about our ancient and distantly related cousins.